Food, Geography of

What humans eat varies dramatically across space. The food we consume, or even the style of cooking called a “cuisine,” can tell us much about the site and situation of a place. The particularities of the place's site, such as its climate, soils, plant and animal life, and location, provide the options from which people choose to eat in that place. But beyond this, what people eat is also shaped by a place's situation or a place's ever-changing relationships with other places. As people migrate, they bring with them their food preferences, cooking techniques, and sometimes also the plants and animals required to make their cuisine. [Page 169]This interaction changes both the migrants and the host society's food choices, producing a hybrid cuisine. Food is often used to describe globalization, a term that captures the most recent consequences of the changing situations of places. Geographers often illustrate globalization by describing the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant in American suburbs, the worldwide spread of American-style fast food, and globalization's backlash expressed in the French's protest against “le hamburger.”

The examination of food is also a useful entry point into the discussion of the uniqueness of place. The French word terroir is used to express the qualities of an agricultural product, usually wine, that come from the characteristics of the place where it is produced—the soil, bedrock, local climate, and so on. Eating and drinking can be transformed into a geographic exercise as one considers where the product comes from, what makes that place unique, and how that uniqueness is expressed in the taste of the foodstuff.

There is not a single geography of food but rather many geographies of food. One of the most essential ones is the geography of plant and animal domestication. Domestication occurred as early humans switched from hunting and gathering their food to sedentary societies where they planted their food nearby. Through interaction—the selection and encouragement of certain characteristics through control of the reproduction of plants and animals over time—these plants and animals changed. For example, the modern tomato plant has been modified over time to have large fruit as growers saved and propagated the seeds from plants producing large fruit while discarding seeds from small fruit-bearing plants. Animals have been shaped similarly by human interaction. For example, horses have been bred for specific purposes such as pulling heavy loads (draft horses) and galloping fast but only for short distances (thoroughbreds). By breeding and selection, humans have reshaped nature.

The places of early domestication allowed communities to settle in one place, and in these places new social, political, cultural, and economic structures arose. These domesticated plants and animals and the new social forms diffused outward, changing our world dramatically. We can map where many of our agricultural products were first domesticated. For example, coffee and cotton in East Africa, sugarcane and rice in Southeast Asia, the potato and the tomato in the Andean Uplands, peanuts and the pineapple in present-day eastern Brazil, rice and pigs in West Africa, cattle and grapes in the Mediterranean, the horse and the dog in Southwest Asia, and the blueberry and cranberry in North America. These places of domestication are still important today because they are where most genetic variations in those species are located and where a wealth of indigenous knowledge on how to grow and use those plants and animals still resides in these local communities. For example, although Idaho and Maine grow large amounts of potatoes in the United States, there is little genetic diversity in what they grow. It is in the Andes Mountains where the greatest genetic diversity of the potato exists. In a germ plasm bank (i.e., a seed bank) in Lima, Peru, is stored 151 species of wild potatoes and approximately 4,000 varieties of cultivated potatoes.

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